Google App Engine Blog

News, notes, tips and tricks from the Google App Engine Team

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

At Google I/O this year, we announced that App Engine will be going out of preview before the end of the year. One aspect of leaving preview is our new pricing model. As promised we have started providing the ability for any application Admin to compare their existing cost to their new costs in the Admin Console (under “Billing History”). Now that you have an idea of what changes may impact your app, we’ve also written an article to help you optimize your application. We know many of you would rather code than think about your budget and billing settings, so to help with the transition we are extending a one-time courtesy credit of $50 to all free Apps that sign up for billing and all paid Apps that modify their budgets between now and October 31, 2011. Once you have signed up or made changes to your billing settings, a $50 credit will appear in the “Billing History” area of the Admin Console for your application. For more information on how to enable billing or change your settings, please see Billing and Budgeting Resources.

This is a big step for the App Engine Team; thank you for your continued support and feedback, and we hope you find these tools useful as we get closer to our goal of leaving preview!

I'm confused by the new instance-hour pricing model. My free-to-users app is running six instances that are collectively using .09% CPU time and eightysomething MB of RAM. Right now they would cost 48 cents/hour, which could get me a lot of virtual-machine time elsewhere. I could use fewer instances if I tweaked the scheduling policy and used concurrent requests once my language supports them, but the point is that my current pattern would cost a lot without using much actual CPU and RAM in App Engine's clusters.

Maybe processes are getting high guaranteed resources like a VM, so the price reflects the cost of a process to App Engine? Maybe there will be improvements that make processes as versatile as VMs, or you feel that they already are?

I understand the need for a price increase in general -- App Engine needs to recover its costs and prices were low. It's the way usage is measured that has me confused, not the fact we'll be charged more for usage.

I'm an programmer, One thing i HATE about cloud's in general is the fact that they are product/company specific. The fact that i cant take an application built for GAE and run it on my personal cluster or maybe amazon even rackspaceannoys me quite the bit actually

You could publish an SDK maybe an apache module/or simply an set of python classes

that would replace all GAE specific API's with either public ones or local onesAn call to the mail API turns into an call to the local mail on the serverOn the other hand an call to the image API turns into an remote call with API keys and everything

I'm 16 by the way,And i'l have gotten a job with you by 20 i promise :)Iceland - ss9.us